Red-Billed Tropicbird Fine Art Print
A high quality fine art print on Hahnemühle German Etching art paper of a Red-Billed Tropicbird, painted by wildlife painter Charles Collins (c.1680-1744).
Superb Red-Billed Tropicbird Fine Art Print on Museum-Quality Paper
We've meticulously reproduced Red-Billed Tropicbird Fine Art Print on museum-quality fine art paper, matched to size. The 6in x 8in print is produced on Enhanced Matte Art Paper [EMA], a heavy-duty fine art paper with a smooth, non-reflective finish. The 12in x 16in and 18in x 24in prints are produced on 310gsm Hahnemühle German Etching paper [HGE], an acid and lignin-free archival paper with a fine tooth, offering our highest level of detail and longevity.
Both papers are fade-resistant and colourfast, using pigment inks designed to preserve the clarity and depth of the original artwork for decades. Every print is produced to order from a high-resolution master file, ensuring sharp detail and accurate colour reproduction.
* Please note that images of Red-Billed Tropicbird Fine Art Print on our website are lower resolution copies of the originals, for illustrative purposes only. The actual print uses high-resolution source imagery to ensure a crisp, clear, and visually stunning final result.
The Taylor White Collection's 18th Century Watercolour Painting of the Red-Billed Tropicbird
Our Red-Billed Tropicbird comes from the original collection of Taylor White F.R.S. (1701-1772). In the mid-18th Century, White commissioned the celebrated wildlife painter Charles Collins (c.1680 - 1744) to paint a number of specimens for his collection. The watercolour of the Red-Billed Tropicbird was among the works Collins produced for White.
The original Red-Billed Tropicbird watercolour is finely painted, with remarkable detail, allowing the plumage and features of the Red-Billed Tropicbird to be seen in stunning clarity. This depth of colour and detail has been captured brilliantly through the digitisation process and is replicated here for your home or office decor, or as a thoughtful gift.
Taylor White, a barrister by profession and later Puisne Judge for Chester, was a keen naturalist and Fellow of the Royal Society, elected in 1725. Over nearly forty years from the 1730s until his death in 1772, he commissioned 938 watercolours of birds, mammals, fish and reptiles, including the Red-Billed Tropicbird, now held at McGill University and painted almost entirely by two artists, Charles Collins and Peter Paillou. White was a founding governor of The Foundling Hospital in London and served as its treasurer for the last twenty-five years of his life. His well-connected social and scientific circle gave his artists exceptional access to specimens: his second wife, Frances Armstrong, was the daughter of General John Armstrong, Governor of the Tower of London and Chief Royal Engineer, and White's artists painted the lions, wolves and other animals of the Royal Menagerie there. He also borrowed specimens from the British Museum, and received rare and exotic birds from friends, including the naturalist Joseph Banks, who sailed to Newfoundland in 1766, and William Harrison, who brought back specimens from voyages testing his father's marine chronometer.
The Red-Billed Tropicbird
This 18th Century watercolour of the Red-Billed Tropicbird is the work of Charles Collins, one of the most accomplished bird painters working in Britain in the first half of the 1700s. It belongs to the Taylor White Collection, an extensive body of natural history studies assembled by the lawyer and naturalist Taylor White and now held by McGill University Library.
Collins painted from specimens rather than from life, and the Red-Billed Tropicbird would have reached him as a preserved skin brought back from a voyage to tropical waters. What distinguishes his work is how little that shows. The bird is given a poised, upright presence, its plumage rendered with the fine, controlled brushwork that characterises the finest natural history painting of the period, at a time when accurate depiction was the only means of recording a species for those who would never see one.
The Red-Billed Tropicbird
The Red-Billed Tropicbird, Phaethon aethereus, is a seabird of tropical oceans worldwide, breeding in the Atlantic, the eastern Pacific and the northern Indian Ocean. It is unmistakable: largely white plumage finely barred with black across the back, bold black markings through the eye, a heavy coral-red bill, and a pair of central tail streamers that can nearly double the bird’s apparent length in flight.
These are birds of the open ocean. They come ashore only to breed, spending the rest of the year far from land, feeding on fish and squid taken by plunge-diving from height. Flying fish are a particular staple, and tropicbirds will follow shoals across long distances.
Breeding and Maturity
Red-Billed Tropicbirds nest on cliff ledges and in rock crevices, choosing sites inaccessible to most predators. A single egg is laid, and both adults share incubation and the feeding of the chick, which takes around three months to reach independence. The species matures slowly, acquiring full adult plumage and beginning to breed at roughly four to five years of age.
Courtship is conducted on the wing, in extended aerial displays in which pairs circle and glide together above the colony. During these displays the birds are capable of brief backwards flight, an unusual manoeuvre among seabirds.
The Conservation of The Red-Billed Tropicbird
The Red-Billed Tropicbird is currently classified as of Least Concern, though this global assessment conceals real pressure on individual colonies. Introduced rats and cats take eggs and chicks at breeding sites, and habitat loss, human disturbance and shifting ocean conditions all bear on local populations. The Caribbean and eastern Atlantic colonies are among those most closely monitored.
Collins painted the species some two centuries before any of these threats were recorded, at a point when the tropicbird was known in Britain only through the accounts of sailors and the specimens they carried home.
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